Google search usually works fine to respond to most short queries or questions, if the online information exists. Specifically, Googling can provide suggestions for software tools. Just Google productivity Chrome extensions or lead generation tools to see some suggestions in these tools’ categories.

Tip: Google two or three names of similar tools to land on blogs with tools reviews and to learn about other similar tools.

That said, it’s useful to know about some specialized websites. First, you may find longer, if not exhaustive, lists of tools, to help you to make better informed choices. Second, you can not only search within a tool category, but find alternatives to a specific tool that you are familiar with.

I’d like to share a couple of my favorites and also provide ways to search them better.

Product Hunt crowd-sources tools. It lists tools, collections of tools, and users who create collections.

Its search capability is a bit limited. As an example, here are the tools with the keywords email find. It’s interesting to search for tool collections that include a specific tool, but the site doesn’t offer that. To find those, you can X-Ray on Google. Here’s an example:

site:producthunt.com inurl:collections rapportive

Alternativeto.net lists alternatives to tools. It’s also crowdsourced information.The site offers narrowing down by platforms, categories, and licences. As an example, here are free Chrome Extensions for Business listed on the site.

It’s easy to find lists of alternatives to a given tool. Here’s an example:

http://alternativeto.net/software/rapportive

Funny enough, Alternativeto.net would find its own competitor; here are 47 more sites to explore!

http://alternativeto.net/software/alternativeto

Curious about the best tools? Join us for the upcoming Double Webinar on Tools – packed with hand-on info on Sourcing, Recruiting, Research, and Productivity tools. Lecture: Tuesday, February 24th, 2015. Practice: Wednesday, February 25th, 2015. You can sign up for one session or both.

If you have hit the new Commercial Use Limit on Search on LinkedIn, your search results screen will look like this – the first few results are shown and the rest are blurred:

Amazingly, the “commercial” search limit affects even the search for your first level connections!

(If you have a basic or a job seeker account and are doing lots of searching, but don’t see the limit, it may be that your account has not been “upgraded” yet. In this case you won’t see the full profiles for the 3rd level connections either.)

Here’s how to un-blur the hidden profiles – and see this instead (!):

Step-By-Step Instructions for the Unblurring Tool

1. View the HTML source code for the search results page and save it in a text file.
2. In the saved file, replace-all this text: “isBlurred”:true, for nothing (i.e. remove all occurrences of the text).
3. Save the file on your HD with an HTML extension (for example, name it results.html).
4. That’s it; just view the file.

To find out all about many other tips and ways to take advantage of LinkedIn for Sourcing and Recruiting, sign up for the upcoming Maximize ROI on LinkedIn – Webinar Thu Feb 12, 2015 (Note the new date! Seating is limited).

LinkedIn is the No. 1 Social Network used by Recruiters and Sourcers around the world, with no competition in sight. It may seem that, with the major new restrictions on searching and on InMails, you have to go for a premium account or even get Recruiter seats for everyone on your team. The decisions are yours; I am going to help to make them by providing extensive information on working around the new restrictions and taking full advantage of the “big data” on LinkedIn.

Join the webinar for a complete guide to lifting LinkedIn limitations and maximizing your ROI.

Learn how to:

1. Run unlimited number of searches on LinkedIn.

• Show extra profiles found in search, even after you hit the “commercial limit”
• Utilize lesser-known alternative search functionality
• Use LinkedIn Google X-Ray and an array of Custom Search Engines (that I will provide) to run any number of searches you want

2. Overcome the new restrictive InMail policy.

• Learn about tools and techniques to find the contact information for LinkedIn members
• Send InMails and messages that don’t count against your quota

3. See anyone’s LinkedIn profile – even for those out of your network – using a “hack” that works for 100% of LinkedIn member profiles. (By signing for the webinar, you promise to keep this a secret and not to disclose it publicly.)

Who Should Attend:

The webinar is a must-attend for anyone who uses LinkedIn to search for and reach out to qualified professionals. It is going to be useful and applicable for users with any level of account, from basic to LinkedIn Recruiter.

Increase your ROI on LinkedIn – sign up for the webinar NOW. This webinar will likely be sold out.

• Date: Thursday February 12, 2015
• Time: 9 AM PST / noon EST
• Duration: 90 minutes
• Price: $99 <<< this is where you submit the webinar payment
• Included: the slides, a video-recording, a tip sheet with custom search engines, and one month of support (for anyone who signs up, whether you attend the webinar “live” or not).

Seating is limited.

Note: after you have completed the payment, we’ll email you the link to access the webinar and all the materials, within 24 hours.

Finding someone’s email address, starting from a social profile (such as a LinkedIn profile), and finding social profiles, starting from an email address, are two kinds of top-requested productivity tools for Sourcers, Recruiters, Sales Professionals, and Social Media Marketers these days, for many good reasons, such as the new rigid limitations for both searching for professionals and for sending InMails on LinkedIn.

Here are some tools in each of the two categories.

Profiles from Emails:

1. Rapportive: shows a LinkedIn profile and, possibly, your “degree of connectedness” on LinkedIn, some connections in common, and a link to connect. It shows the Twitter handle too, but only if it’s attached to the person’s LinkedIn profile.
2. Rapporto was a “hacked” version of Rapportive and a temporary fix for losing the previous Rapportive functionality, but, it seems, it has stopped working altogether.
3. Vibe shows social profiles when you hover over an email address anywhere on a page.
4. Fullcontact for Gmail (Beta) operates in your Gmail contacts. It shows social profiles and other information about the person and company.
5. Sidekick by Hubspot is for tracking email; also shows social profiles and information about the person and company. It has a Gmail and a MS Outlook versions.
6. Outlook Social Connector shows Facebook, LinkedIn, and XING profiles and the latest updates. It has been unreliable (for me) lately in getting information from LinkedIn.
7. Nimble (free trial) is a teaser, since it offers to load whole large lists in a variety of formats. It does look up some social profiles – but only when you view the profile in question – not for the list in batch.
8. Discover.ly finds some social profiles from an email address in Gmail Inbox only (it doesn’t work in a “compose” window), as part of its functionality.

As you probably know – some social networks offer look-ups of profiles, starting with an email address, as well:

1. Just paste the email address into the Facebook search box and into Google-Plus search box to identify the profile registered with the address.
2. In Gmail, see the “connected” profile for any contact – automatically.
3. Connect Twitter with a Gmail account, to cross-reference email addresses (this only works if your Gmail has under a couple hundred entries or so).
4. …Alas, all of the integrating with social accounts functionality in the LinkedIn Contacts has been broken for several months now. It just doesn’t work. (How frustrating!)

Emails from Profiles:

1. If you use one of the above tools, you can try email permutations with the hopes to uncover the correct email address.
2. Prophet: Starting with a social profile on Facebook, Twitter, or a profile on “the large social network based out of Mountain View”, it shows other social data and can try to guess and verify email addresses.
3. Connectifier has stopped working for me some time ago, but some colleagues can still access its database on  trial basis.
4. Connect6 PeopleDiscovery shows social data and now charges $1 to find an email address.
5. 360social shows email addresses for some people.

Sign up for the Tools webinar coming up on Thursday January 29, 2015, to hear all about these tools, with a detailed side-by-side comparison, as well as 50+ other tools!

Due to the just-introduced Commercial Use Limit on Search, many LinkedIn members are hitting the search quota for the month in the first day or two of January 2015 – and have to wait another month to search again. LinkedIn didn’t say how many searches are “too many”; the experience shows it’s around sixty searches for one month.

I find limiting the search for unpaid accounts reasonable. It’s not new; a number of commercial search system have similar limitations.

If you are struggling with the new limits on searching and are not ready to go with a paid account yet:

1) There are a number of ways to search that are not counted in the monthly quota. These ways are no substitute for the advanced member search, but can be quite useful. This includes:

• Alumni Search
• Field of Study Explorer
• Group Member Search
• Contact Search (unfortunately, really buggy; importing to contacts is also buggy, has mostly stopped working)
• Look at “People Also Viewed”

2) Naturally, Googling for LinkedIn profiles (“X-Raying”) remains unlimited!

Use this Custom Search Engine to X-Ray LinkedIn:

http://bit.ly/Search-LinkedIn

(I have updated the Search Engine URL to provide up to 1,000 results.) Here are some example uses:

• “.Net developer at” (targeting .Net Developers)
• Spanish “native or bilingual” (targeting bilingual English-Spanish members)
• RN “Greater New York City Area” (targeting Registered Nurses in the NYC Area)
• intitle:MBA (members listing MBA as part of the last name)
• inurl:uk (members in the UK)

Enjoy!

Want to search like a Pro? Don’t miss the Advanced Sourcing DOUBLE-Webinar next Tuesday and Wednesday Jan 13/14. The seats are going fast!

In a few days from now LinkedIn is switching to taking away the InMail points for those InMails that were not answered. There has been lots of negative reaction to the change, and rightly so. Sure, if an InMail is spam, the recipient may not answer it. But the opposite is not true: if someone doesn’t answer the InMail, it doesn’t mean that the InMail is spam: we know how busy everyone is; and it’s quite common not to answer if there’s no interest. Due to the change in the InMail policy, even those of us with expensive LinkedIn Recruiter accounts will not have enough InMails for the “normal” volume of messaging potential candidates.

There’s a lot of complaints from paid users, posted online; this includes two posts on our group: 1) Who else got the notice that on 1/1/15 LI is NOT going to credit unanswered InMails… and 2) I just completed one of Irina’s EXCELLENT webinars … – with a total of 70+comments from the upset LinkedIn customers.

It’s too bad that the service has changed to the worse, but LinkedIn still remains “the” place to source. As a database of professional profiles it still has no competition anywhere near.

Clearly, we would now benefit from knowing how to find members’ email addresses, phone numbers, or ways to message them elsewhere, even more than before. I plan to write some posts about these techniques.

In this post, I’d like to describe a suggestion for LinkedIn Recruiter users on how to alleviate the change of InMail policy. Here it is:

Use Talent Pipeline; populate your LinkedIn Recruiter account with as many external records as possible.

With the “import candidates” function in the Talent Pipeline you can add email addresses to many profiles at a time – up to 5K profiles per upload of an excel file. (When importing, you can use tags to classify the records, to help with future sourcing; or use “projects”, but then you will be limited to 2K records at a time.)

When importing an Excel file in LinkedIn Recruiter, you will see a list like this:

For the members identified by the emails addresses from the uploaded file, we’ll see the green message “LinkedIn profile found” (or the orange “Already in Recruiter” if that email was part of a previous import).

If a LinkedIn member has an attached external record with an email address – which happens as a result of importing external records – then, when sending InMails to that member, you do not use the InMail points; the message is delivered by email:

Mass-InMails in Recruiter will default to emailing those with the email addresses and InMailing the rest.

If you have LOTs of email addresses of your potential candidates uploaded, you can search on LinkedIn and continue using InMail, just as you used to, while not using as many InMail “points”.

How can you get massive volumes of email addresses for your target professional population? Uploading all email addresses from your ATS (or CRM) is a good idea. Depending on what you have access to, use sites that provide lists of emails (connect.data.com, zoominfo.com, and hiringsolved.com are some sites that I use.) Also: search for Excel files with contact info, using Google. Look into professional forums, lists of association members, etc. Create lists of professionals for those companies that have a standard email pattern. Upload all of those lists.

The more records are uploaded using Talent Pipeline, the better. If some of the uploaded email addresses are wrong or outdated, the record will simply not link to a profile, but there’s no harm in that. The activity populating your Recruiter account with email addresses can be spread over time. It  will pay off, as you contact potential candidates, that you find via search on LinkedIn.

I would also like to invite you to sign up for the first webinar in 2015 on Google-Based Sourcing. The webinar offers 3 hours of training (lecture and practice); check it out!

In 2014, our LinkedIn group – by far, the largest global community of people who are interested in Sourcing – reached 28K Members and the Boolean Strings Ning Network reached 7K members. Thanks to all for participating and sharing great content- and Happy Holidays!

The Bi-Weekly Sourcing Chats on the Ning Network, moderated by Master Sourcer David Galley, have been well attended in 2014 and always had great content, appreciated by all.

The Chats are not archived; the content stays up for about a day after the chat is over. (Of course, members are free to come and chat at any time outside of the “official” hours as well.)

Here are a few favorite free tools shared by the members of the Internet Sourcing Community in the last few sessions of 2014 at the Chats. Have you used these tools?

Email tracking:

• Yesware
• Sidekick

Find the technology behind a site/find the webmaster or developer: BuiltWith (Chrome extension)

Social Look-up and Contact Info Search:

• Connect6
• Prophet
• Connectifier (it has switched to paid-only for most users who have signed up)
• Full Contact for Gmail

Broadlook’s “Contact Capture” as a Chrome Extension (the free part of the Extension): Capture!

Organize Info while Sourcing: Evernote

Access (lots of) public records – search by name, location: Family search.

The next Sourcing Chat is coming up on January 8, 2015; please join and bring your Sourcing questions and your suggestions for cool tools.

Looking to access in-depth coverage of Sourcing tools and methods? Go to our Training Library for single-subject in-depth webinars; sign up for the Sourcing Guidebook susbcription to have access to all topics Sourcing and ongoing support; or check out a “double-webinar” on Google Sourcing  (lecture AND practice) coming up January 6-7, 2015.